Sanjay Gupta, Country Head and V-P of Google India, continues to believe in the promise of the India market, even as the company grapples with regulatory headwinds in the country. In the ninth edition of Google for India on Thursday, Google announced novel launches for the country. This includes partnerships with banks and financial companies for credit penetration for GPay users, the launch of DigiKavach to prevent users against financial fraud, as well as the launch of a multilingual AI platform for citizen empowerment services. Gupta sat down with businessline to share his views around the vision for the firm in the current economic landscape. Excerpts:
After completing four years at the helm of Google India, how are you evaluating the market? Do you see growth momentum and headwinds?
I think it has been a momentous moment in the last four years for India, given Covid and the adoption of digital. From my vantage point, I see the growth of digital faster than ever before. I do believe digital adoption will trend towards a billion in two years. So, the momentum is very high.
When I think from the business lens, when I look at the ecosystem of advertising revenues, they are growing and growing fast. And so is subscription. The market is becoming more balanced. There are enough consumers who can afford to pay for subscriptions.
Will the new regulations around privacy have an impact on ad revenues for Google, since they endeavour to limit collection of user data?
So, what I said about subscriptions earlier was not to do with Google, but for the market in general. We have a modest subscription business, mostly YouTube, but it is still really, really small. If you look at the market, look at all the media and entertainment companies, the number of subs that they have are growing in double-digit. So, that’s a picture for four to five years on. It’s an exciting cycle, in whose context we are thinking of the question of privacy.
But do we observe privacy to be a roadblock or causing friction to our business? I feel, given our values, we believe these are important things to solve for the future of the Internet. I think the reality is that the Internet is becoming core to everything from education to entertainment to events.. And if you’re not able to keep our users safe from misinformation, financial fraud, and equally provide a robust data privacy model – we will lose the trust of the users.
In July 2020, Sundar Pichai had announced a $10-billion digitisation fund. How much of the fund has been used till now?
Specifically, I think, we announced in 2020 that we will spend that money over the next five to seven years. We will continue to invest using that money in the next few years.
Google is set to manufacture Pixel phones in India, have you zeroed in on a contract manufacturer yet? Will you rule out Lava, given its troubles with the ED? Do you think the geopolitical tensions with China create a real demand for Pixel phones in India?
There’s no correlation between the environment in India and what we are doing. We look at India much beyond what everybody else is doing. Strategically makes sense, India is a really exciting market to be in for us. And how do we serve as consumers with the best technology that is a question that we keep debating on. I cannot speak specifically on Lava.
Will the CCI judgments against Google dampen your investment vigor for the country?
We deeply care about consumers as a company. We have been very mindful and careful around how we cater to that. The regulations in India have been very balanced as well. I am leaving CCI for a moment – for enabling innovation, and solving for safety for the consumer. I think we just need to do more from a CCI perspective, explain ourselves better to the stakeholders so that they understand. Then, it is all about enabling higher levels of opportunities.
Your aim was to double Google’s headcount by 2023. Can you give us an update on hiring, especially as it has slowed down in the tech sector?
We have been investing in our research lab in Bangalore, which we have scaled up very significantly over the last few years. We have a portion of cloud business operating from here, a large amount of tech talent is based out of India. Whether it is around UI UX technology capabilities, or cloud, or search there is high quality talent here, and we are very focused on growing here. But I won’t be able to share any specific numbers. But India continues to be a key focus for Google.
India’s contribution to Google’s revenues continues to be in single digit, even though you rack up major investments. When do you see the tipping point coming when India contributes to revenues significantly?
I think the role that India plays in the world economy will really pave the growth trajectory for Google. But I think what excites us, given our current vision, is that we are a company which believes in impacting lives at scale. And I think, for me, the focus on India is much beyond just business. We believe the problem that you’re solving, the idea of enabling consumers everyday is so much deeper and bigger. When we solve for India we solve for the rest of the world.
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Published on October 19, 2023
